I have spent ages trying to enable hardware acceleration
on a Dell Inspiron 5000. A staggering number of different
configuration combinations have been tried but, alas, no
success so far. I would really appreciate a hint or two.
I know that some people have had success with Xfree86,
and most of the documentation I have read applies to that.

A few details. I am using a kernel compiled from the
vanilla 2.6.7 source code. The Xserver is provided by
xorg-x11 6.7.0-r2. The output from lspci has this line:

0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies \
Inc Rage Mobility P/M AGP 2x (rev 64)

I have specified in /etc/xorg.conf that "dri" and "glx" should
be loaded. The log file indicates that they are loaded. Indeed,
there appear to be no errors messages in that file. There are
some apparently encouraging lines there, too, such as these:

/var/log/Xorg.0.logII) ATI(0): Using Mach64 accelerator CRTC.
/var/log/Xorg.0.logII) ATI(0): Using XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA)

However, when I run glxinfo it produces these lines:

direct rendering: No
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect

I have tried deselecting DRM support and recompiling the
kernel. I have tried "opengl-update ati". For whatever reason,
that increases the glxgears frame-rate, but glxinfo still produces
the two lines quoted above. Removing the "dri" line from xorg.conf
makes not a jot of difference.

Here's what lsmod produces:

Module Size Used by
slhc 6528 1 ppp_generic
ohci_hcd 17668 0
ehci_hcd 24324 0
eagle_usb 105024 0
uhci_hcd 27152 0
intel_agp 16028 1
agpgart 25896 1 intel_agp
[... sound card and ppp lines removed ...]

No Mach64 in there. I don't know if that's important.

I don't know where to go from here. Once again, any help
would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

R.

I appear to have solved the problem.

$> glxinfo | grep render

direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Mach64 [Rage Pro]
\ 20030502 AGP 2x x86/MMX/SSE

R.